The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Mother Nature

By Katharina Gerlach

This book is not just about mistakes writers make but about things they tend to neglect. However it will not tell you "How To" create a world. That is still up to you but the most important point is to create an abundance of living beings and all they need to survive in a believable way.

Generally, this book is aimed at writers of SF or Fantasy. Of course it also is of help in any other genre if you want to avoid mistakes in the details [Nothing is more annoying than a medieval person walking through fields of maize (Columbus imported maize from America; the first fields in Spain were cultivated in 1525) or an east side window showing a glorious sunset (the sun sets in the West)].

• Language: English
• Publisher: A Conspiracy of Authors
• Release date: Jul 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781936507184

Katharina Gerlach

Katharina Gerlach was born in Germany in 1968. She and her three younger brothers grew up in the middle of a forest in the heart of the Luneburgian Heather. After romping through the forest with imagination as her guide, the tomboy learned to read and disappeared into magical adventures, past times, or eerie fairytale woods. She didn’t stop at reading. During her training as a landscape gardener, she wrote her first novel, a manuscript full of a beginner’s mistakes. Fortunately, she found books on Creative Writing and soon her stories improved. For a while, reality interfered with her writing but after finishing a degree in forestry and a PhD in Science she returned to her vocation. She likes to write Fantasy, Science Fiction and Historical Novels for all age groups. At present, she is writing at her next project in a small house near Hildesheim, Germany, where she lives with her husband, her children and her dog.

Book preview

About the Author

Katharina Gerlach was born as the oldest child of a forester and his wife in Germany. Growing up with three brothers in the middle of a forest nothing much could shock her any more.

After taking her A-levels, she decided to study forestry, a subject with -at that time- nearly 50 tests and exams counting towards the degree. Before the intermediate exam she spent one year studying in Edinburgh. After graduation she worked on a forest-simulation computer program in Bayreuth, finishing her education with a PhD in Science.

In Bayreuth, Katharina started to concentrate earnestly on a career as an author. She self-trained with creative writing books from the US (at that time there were none available in German) and managed to get several short stories published.

In 2005 her first historical novel Engels Freiheit was published by a small publisher in Germany. She translated Ann Angel's Freedom and successfully self-published it as paperback (ISBN 978-1847537546), hardcover and e-book.

Since then she had some more short stories published in different anthologies. She also wrote three novels (one Science Fiction, two Fantasy) that are currently under consideration by an agent. Currently, she is translating the online-comic for adults No Rest For The Wicked by Andrea L. Peterson while simultaneously working on her second historical novel, a independent sequel to Ann Angel's Freedom.

Although no longer actively working in the field of forestry, she is treasurer and web-mistress of the organization Frauen im Forstbereich e.V. (women in forestry, website in German only).

In her spare time she is a mother of three daughters, wife to a caring man (in love for a quarter of a century and married since 1997), proud owner of a used house, a used dog, a used motorbike and a rather new PC.

If you need more help on any subject covered here mail her. She will answer as long as her time allows.

* My email me: [e-mail]

* My website: http://www.tapio-de.org/

Table of Contents

The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Mother Nature

About the Author

Dedication

Introduction

Mistake One: The Sun

Mistake Two: The Moon

Mistake Three: The Stars

Mistake Four: Light

Mistake Five: Water

Mistake Six: Wind and Water

Mistake Seven: Weather

Mistake Eight: Climate

Mistake Nine: Pollution

Mistake Ten: Life

Mistake Eleven: Classification

Mistake Twelve: Food Chain

Mistake Thirteen: Primary Producer

Mistake Fourteen: Chemosynthesis

Mistake Fifteen: Predator-Prey Relationship

Mistake Sixteen: The Soil

Mistake Seventeen: Soil Life

Mistake Eighteen: Fungi

Mistake Nineteen: Algae

Mistake Twenty: Recycling

Mistake Twenty-One: Diseases

Mistake Twenty-Two: Microorganisms Again

Mistake Twenty-Three: Reproduction In Plants

Mistake Twenty-Four: Reproduction In Vertebrates

Mistake Twenty-Five:Reproduction In Other Organisms

Mistake Twenty-Six: Evolution

Mistake Twenty-Seven: Natural Selection

Mistake Twenty-Eight: Extinction

Mistake Twenty-Nine: Body Size

Mistake Thirty: Extremists

Mistake Thirty-One: Symbiosis

Mistake Thirty-Two: Behavior

Mistake Thirty-Three: Misbehavior

Bonus Chapter: Aliens and Their Like

Conclusion

Welcome to A Conspiracy of Authors

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my husband for putting up with a wife who's got her head in the clouds most of the time and to my three daughters for their understanding when dinner was overcooked once again.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Particular thanks to Jaqueline Girdner for helping me keep my mistakes in order, to Gregory Booi for the blue tourists and to Ann Reasoner for sharing wisdom from years giving walking tours with the City Guide Tours.

Introduction

I thank the people at http://www.wikipedia.org/for providing me with magnificent pictures and graphics about many subjects I came up with and publishing them under the GNU Free Documentation License or similar.

Also I would like to thank my professors at the University of Göttingen in Germany for making me understand nature in a way that I did not forget it in all those years.

Finally, I thank Holly Lisle for providing a platform where all my weird interests, my fragmented knowledge about a million subjects, my taste for off-topic topics is not just accepted but eagerly sought after.

And here is to you, dear reader, for being interested in what I can tell you. I hope that my advice will help you to create novels that feel authentic to your own readers.

Introduction

This book is not just about mistakes writers make but about things they tend to neglect. However it will not tell you How To create a world. That is still up to you but the most important point is to create an abundance of living beings and all they need to survive in a believable way.

In the article "What is